I say they are talentless freaks. And so fun to have Firewalk Studio on your CV. In the post modern game environment. Hint they probably not gone check that you was in jail.
TBF except the absolute jank artstyle it looked quite allright. If they hired a different lead artist to give the characters normal looking clothes it could've at least break even on sales.
Really the only people who probably shouldn't be fired are the programmers and maybe the artists for UVMaps. They are paid to do a job and whatever they say about the project well is it done on time and what is asked for with nothing extra and nothing missing? If so then they did a good job if not then they are not doing their job correctly. The creatives should be fired for coming up with a bad story idea and the original marketing team is just redundant so they should also get fired. Programmers who know the game engine that is being used are good as that is less time taken for whatever Sony's next game is will take to make. UVMap artists well UVMaps are annoying to learn how they work and if they know how to that is a skill in and of itself that is hard to teach. The creatives? They made a bad story and the story is mostly what tanked the game. Marketing? They didn't stop do a good job at marketing as even a bad good should sell 100k or more copies. Management? they should also be fired for not controlling the employees who were tanking the game before release. It really doesn't matter what the employees think as long as the product sells. That is how management should think. For team leaders? Well the developer team leads seem to have done a good job just the artist team lead seems to not know what is good art or is told to have it look that way by another that they will have to explain to HR to have a chance of not being fired. Creative team lead? As the story was one of the major points the game didn't sell their job is gone. Consultants? well fire them all. Sony already has enough and they would just be redundant employees. HR? Sony already has a HR department so HR's jobs are most likely gone. Maybe a few can justify that they are worth keeping but in the long run either they will get fire or someone already employed at Sony doing the same job will get fired. Game Design? They will get fired. They have 0 reason to still for hired as their game failed. VAs? I am pretty sure FireTeam didn't hire any VAs but used contractor VAs for everything. So the VAs have already gone onto their next contract or 10 by now. Motion Capture people? As everything was so generic I am thinking they used premade assets so 0 motion capture people.
I'm willing to bet money this is how it went down: "OK, we're going to bring Concord back as a free to play game, but you guys need to make the characters hot." "We can't do that. It would be letting the bigots win." "Well, then, I guess we'll have to shut the studio down."
I imagine it was less divisive and more basic. "Ok, let's fix what is wrong with the game. What do we need to change?" "We don't know. The game had everything." "Well, if we don't know how to fix the game, then I guess we just have to make it a tax write-off" After all, not a single DEI infested company has been able to admit what was wrong, and their products were always flawless.
I don't believe that it's coming from the real developers. Engineering is still a more Conservative field. And they are geeks & don't care about politics. All they want is to develop a cool game.
I think it went more along the line of them wanting a re-release but Sony sent someone who actually understand how economy work to check their numbers. Reworking the game as F2P and re-releasing it would just be throwing more money down the drain. Firewalk themselves were clearly the people claiming it would be reworked, but you don't need to be a financial genius to see how that would end up. Making the characters hot would not be enough to save them, the gameplay sucked too. It could have helped the initial sales if it launched like that but the end result would be the same.
The game industry has been doing a lot of fucking around for the last several years. Now the finding out stage has begun. We'll see if they learn anything.
It's really sad because these activist/woke terds are just losing more opportunities for jobs for those who are more qualified....hopefully other studios learn...hopefully
Woke keeps failing hard af but they just keep doing it like they’re the stupid ones who don’t like to make money. People need to start asking why this is literally everywhere.
I think they hope they can simultaneously destroy independent media while forcing people to like their subpar products. However, nothing is working since gamers just play something else or worse, we just take our old games from the dust bin.
Yeah they gave up probably cuz they ralized that firwalks dumbass devs who called us assholes for reviewing the game honestly wouldnt break and fix it so they got shut down
@@TheDougiomaybe, but the main argument that it was going FTP was that people noticed it was still getting updates on Steam, ostensibly from the dev team. Seems more and more tho that they always intended to have updates after launch that were staggered
Yeah... the ensuing silence from other tech corps was amazing. They all watched Twitter to see if he could pull it off... and he did! Turns out you don't need 10 mouse clicking employees per engineer. Who woulda thunk it?
You realize Twitter lost over 80% of its value within two years right? And the app currently works worse than before in every way. Elon Musk is not the genius you think he is, he's a scam artist.
I'd really like to know what the hell was going through Sony executives thick skulls when they poured money into this trashfire. 400 million down the toilet.
IDK if U ever heard of this but apparently we were suppose to get a cross over game between inFamous and Prototype but it was cancelled for Concord 💀 But hey man at least we got to see both Cole and Alex interact on Death Battle 🤷
@@Koda.R I honestly am convinced that companies these days don’t give a damn on much money they’re losing and that they wouldn’t give less of a shit if they went bankrupt or not.
What I find so hilarious is that Xbox and Sony spent tens of billions of dollars buying all these studios only to be closing them down and laying off staff. Hopefully they realise sooner rather than later that the customer wields the power !!
And that the talent that populate those studios ARE the studio. Replace the talent and you lose everything. But for those big corporations an employee is an employee and they are all the same! 🤯
Costa Concordia the Titanic clone and the AF Concorde passenger jet, and now a game called Concord with its Studio.....I'm seeing a pattern and I'm scared for the Mario Bros....
I don’t think you understand a tax write off. Shutting this down isn’t a tax write off like movies. Movies are tax write off because they just take the hit without spending more on advertising. This game is already out, the only future expenses would be servers and dlc content which aren’t significant compared to marketing an unreleased movie. They shut down this down because it failed so hard
No Kneon, this doesn't need to stop, this needs to continue, we are witnessing the invisible hand of the market, let these studios fail and crash and a new age of indie games begin.
We also have unqualified ceo's and managers... I dare say most business owners are unqualified. Profits are only good if they don't make you compromise ethics. Wokeism came about from the last generation being power-hungry and cruel to everyone. If it's all about profits, then hiring bounty hunters would be fine, but it's not. Ethics must lead us, not profits.
Translation: "This was a dumpster fire of epic proportions that we'd like to forget as quickly as possible. To that end, we thank you for your efforts, here are your pink slips, and GTFO of your cubicles. Don't let the door hit you in the azz on the way out."
Is it ultimately as simple as a Sony boss wanted their own version of a hero shooter, regardless of industry trends and the state of the genre, and didn't think past that goal?
Don't forget U.K. based, SEGA-owned prominent game studio Creative Assembly tried to pull that too, with "Hyenas". Which nobody wanted, and which SEGA forced them to cancel and reassign the money and devs that were being wasted on it to actually PROFITABLE projects, like their flagship of flagship titles, Warhammer (Fantasy) III, in their flagship game series, Total War. Good on SEGA. They like to protect their investments in studios they own, and they monetize the HECK out of their most prominent in-house IP, Sonic, not just consistently releasing games, (like Sonic X Shadow Generations), but ALSO making deals to have EXCELLENT live action movies of Sonic made (the third of which comes out soon), AND making deals with LEGO (since 2016) to create licensed sets representing the Sonic IP. SEGA evidently LIKES making money! Apparently Sony doesn't. Because if they did, they would NEVER have commissioned Concord, or at LEAST canceled it somewhere along in its 8 FREAKING YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT before its DISASTROUS release!
That's what happened when Vtubing blew up. They bought a handful of smaller Vtuber agencies as the pandemic started winding down and viewership was plummeting, and then dissolved said agencies like a year later. It really sucked because unlike lots of failed Vtuber agencies, Sony had big bucks that let the talents do things like do song covers of American songs (even Hololive is mostly limited to JP songs), and then they just did nothing to support the girls and then peaced out.
15:55 literally listening in background, just alt-tabbed from nfs mw (2005) to say it. 2005 graphics are lowkey good enough. And you can easly slap on some graphic enhancing mods too. And also the game is much more polished.
They did the same when they tried to get into Vtuber agencies. They bought a handful of agencies, then like a year later they shut them down. Poor PRISM Project. They should've succeeded (Sony gave them song cover perms even established agencies like Hololive would kill for), but Sony just dropped them.
Expect them to try to sweep Concord under the rug and burning it and the entire house to ashes. Nothing about that game is salvageable, let alone anything to be proud of. All the people who worked on it best have used aliases if they wish to get a new job, but I doubt they had that foresight.
Merit should have been the matter. Fans and customers are the ones that should be catered to. Pokémon would have been next since they have DEI hires instead of merit hires. Guitar Hero is a "too big to fail series" that failed, meaning that Pokémon may fail too.
Guitar hero was a gimmick franchise with accessories that everyone got tired of rebuying. Pokemon is just backed by the richest toy makers in the world and an audience with so much tism they can't tell a good game from a bad one. Pokemon has plenty of money left in it.
@@wdf70Ed Sheeran's music label will demand millions of dollars to reuse 'Celestial' whenever there will be more Pokémon Scarlet and Violet copies to sell. That does happen like with Rage Against-I mean, Raging For the Machine to be able to feature 'Guerrilla Radio' in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2. Pokémon would lose money from different ways.
@@LuigiTheMetal64 I'd take a look into their marketing strategies and where their market share comes from. Nintendo makes pennies off their pokemon titles with majority of their money coming from merchandise sales. Look it up. Plushies sell 10x more than pokemon games.
I am surprised that Sony took that long to make the decision to close Firewalk Studios. There should be Harvard Business Case Study created on how not to run a game studio.
Pretty sure Sony lost way more than $400 million since this is only for the game budget. If we count the cost of marketing and how ever much Sony spent buying the studio, the actual cost is at least $500 ~ $600 million if we are being generous.
Also all of the future unrelated projects they probably have to cancel. Lotsa modern corpos plan out product road maps assuming they will receive X amount of money. If they don't hit those goals, well...
Sony, what happened to you? Where is your QC team? Seriously you would imagine that having money would afford better research and development. If this was going to happen, why not just be rip-off mercs? Less wastage! And you would have had at least 200 titles! Of better quality!
Never played BG3 because of the gay bear humping. I loved the first two though, and people seem to like the third so I might have to check it out on sale.
@matthewoconnor2742 And I don't mind if the game includes gay bear humping, it's just usually a sign of woke ideology creeping in. Ie, strang whamans, midevial Europe looking like downtown LA 2024, all women being beaten with the ugly stick within an inch of their life and that sort of thing.
It was such a massive waste of money and time, it would be hard to imagine the shareholders aren't screaming their faces off. The fact this thing was green-lit and released and NOBODY in upper management realised how bad it was, the fact that they were even enthusiastic about it... They have no idea what they're doing. These executives in entertainment must be getting gas-lit like crazy with people around them telling them how great these projects are. The fact they have another project exactly like this around the corner and people are already expecting it to flop, the industry is in such a terrible state. They're so far detached from what their customers want and polarised against it, it's become such a joke. At some point an adult has to enter the room and point out how much money and time is being wasted. There's just so much value that's been lost to this dumb fad. So many years, so much money, so much productivity just lost for nothing. Their only job is to make something entertaining and they refuse to do it. The only thing they can make that's fun is a kid's game about a robot, because there's no way anyone can screw with it to turn it into something obnoxious.
The second players hopped on and realized they couldn’t replay characters they would’ve left. What character shooter actively prevents players from maining a character??
Concord crashed and burned because Sony no longer understands the gaming market. They released a slow-ass, woke-as-hell, hero shooter for $40 in 2024. What could go wrong?
I’ve said this many times about keeping older games going! Batman Arkham Knight was such a good game engine and graphically detailed where you could’ve kept making episode dlc/ story add ons and kept that game going with all the stories of different Batman comics
Oh man, the "what could an indie studio do with $400 million?" got me. Imagine the games we could have had if they parced that out $10 million to 40 indie studios, we could have had 40 OUTSTANDING games... Sad days.
8 years and 400 million usd! How many indie or AA projects could they have supported during that time? These teams, timelines, and costs are bloated beyond reason. The tech and entertainment industries need to slim down.
There is only one reason why these activist came to the game industry in the first place, ResetEra. Long before DEI was a thing, ResetEra had all of these damn activists converging on their site. This included employees from Atlus, Bandai, Ubisoft Bioware, etc. While, yes Black Rock, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs can and should be blamed for this DEI crap, never forget it originated on Neogaff and ResetEra back in 2007.
It was obvious to me that this was going to happen. Sony probably thought about bringing Concord back in some way, shape or form, but the amount of work that would take and the amount of resources they would spend was greater than make two AstroBot like games (in quality).
Talking to a friend who got jammed back up in a managerial role. He has Gen Z workers. They don't know how to use Microsoft Office applications. Also, they apparently play retro arcade games for fun. AAA gaming is cooked.
This was not a surprise. There was no way it was going to relaunch. It had so much bad PR that even if you make it free, it can not compete in the market. It is way easier to just burn it down, and reuse the code and make a completely new game.
💯 agree with you Kneon. How long can any company deal with losses before it affects the bottom line. Either you perform well or you’re fired. Simple and direct. Working in manufacturing they have to keep things moving 24/7 for better or worse that’s the nature of the beast. Keep up the good work. Also, prayers for Geeky and that both of you get better. Having Crud is no fun. ❤
It doesn't matter how much people work hard on something. The people who have the highest potential to buy the product decide if it sells or not. Activists don't buy stuff. Gamers want games they can enjoy.
I wonder if Sony will ever realise that the “modern audience” is less than a millionth of what they think that it is? Apparently Sony didn’t learn from Ghostbusters 2014 .
The basics of the law you are referring to is more or less "Even if a product is released. If you recall and destroy all physical versions to the point it is as if it never came out, then you can write it off as a product that was never reached market."
Just think about it. These companies would rather lose $400 million than put an attractive female character in a game.
Mind boggling.
The wokies have turned beauty into a ➡wing thing and tried to elevate the grotesque as normal.
I say they are talentless freaks.
And so fun to have Firewalk Studio on your CV. In the post modern game environment. Hint they probably not gone check that you was in jail.
They genuinely hate their audience. It's insane.
@@MekarWB They also hate women.
Firewalk Studios now identifies as was/were
Boooooooooooommmmmmm lol u got me weak wit this comment lol
hahahahaha
😂😂😂
has/been
Previously talentless/freaks
And Nothing of Value was lost.
Exactly.
With the exception of every dollar Sony put into the studio. It's a complete loss...good!
Yup
Besides Sony’s $400mil. What an expensive lesson 😂
TBF except the absolute jank artstyle it looked quite allright. If they hired a different lead artist to give the characters normal looking clothes it could've at least break even on sales.
8 years on their first and last game...what a journey! I'd quit game development after that.
LOL
I hope those talentless freaks do quit the industry
I'm guessing most of them are toxic which means they will find another job right away.
Microsoft's Halo studios were offering them jobs on LinkedIn, so don't hold your breath.
8 years and they still probably haven't learned to code.
I bet that “talentless freak” money is looking good now.
"Our Principals will hold!"
"Want a monthly check?"
"Sounds good!"
Really the only people who probably shouldn't be fired are the programmers and maybe the artists for UVMaps. They are paid to do a job and whatever they say about the project well is it done on time and what is asked for with nothing extra and nothing missing? If so then they did a good job if not then they are not doing their job correctly.
The creatives should be fired for coming up with a bad story idea and the original marketing team is just redundant so they should also get fired.
Programmers who know the game engine that is being used are good as that is less time taken for whatever Sony's next game is will take to make. UVMap artists well UVMaps are annoying to learn how they work and if they know how to that is a skill in and of itself that is hard to teach.
The creatives? They made a bad story and the story is mostly what tanked the game.
Marketing? They didn't stop do a good job at marketing as even a bad good should sell 100k or more copies.
Management? they should also be fired for not controlling the employees who were tanking the game before release. It really doesn't matter what the employees think as long as the product sells. That is how management should think.
For team leaders? Well the developer team leads seem to have done a good job just the artist team lead seems to not know what is good art or is told to have it look that way by another that they will have to explain to HR to have a chance of not being fired. Creative team lead? As the story was one of the major points the game didn't sell their job is gone.
Consultants? well fire them all. Sony already has enough and they would just be redundant employees.
HR? Sony already has a HR department so HR's jobs are most likely gone. Maybe a few can justify that they are worth keeping but in the long run either they will get fire or someone already employed at Sony doing the same job will get fired.
Game Design? They will get fired. They have 0 reason to still for hired as their game failed.
VAs? I am pretty sure FireTeam didn't hire any VAs but used contractor VAs for everything. So the VAs have already gone onto their next contract or 10 by now.
Motion Capture people? As everything was so generic I am thinking they used premade assets so 0 motion capture people.
I'm willing to bet money this is how it went down:
"OK, we're going to bring Concord back as a free to play game, but you guys need to make the characters hot."
"We can't do that. It would be letting the bigots win."
"Well, then, I guess we'll have to shut the studio down."
I imagine it was less divisive and more basic.
"Ok, let's fix what is wrong with the game. What do we need to change?"
"We don't know. The game had everything."
"Well, if we don't know how to fix the game, then I guess we just have to make it a tax write-off"
After all, not a single DEI infested company has been able to admit what was wrong, and their products were always flawless.
A crazy wokie's "bigot" is a normal person's "normal person" :D
I don't believe that it's coming from the real developers.
Engineering is still a more Conservative field. And they are geeks & don't care about politics.
All they want is to develop a cool game.
@@bestdjaf7499 oh no, the engineers did a good job. The gameplay in the game was pretty good.
It's all on the art and the writing.
I think it went more along the line of them wanting a re-release but Sony sent someone who actually understand how economy work to check their numbers. Reworking the game as F2P and re-releasing it would just be throwing more money down the drain.
Firewalk themselves were clearly the people claiming it would be reworked, but you don't need to be a financial genius to see how that would end up.
Making the characters hot would not be enough to save them, the gameplay sucked too. It could have helped the initial sales if it launched like that but the end result would be the same.
200 million to get wrong, and spent another 200 million just to get it another kind of wrong
In total a 400 million dollar failure.
All for an ideology. Crazy.
These losers are messing it up for people who actually want to work in studios and are more qualified
@@daviddesrosiers1946they have to push it no matter the cost, it’s about them converting young minds to their way of thinking not about entertainment.
Nah, fr. 200 million to get it wrong is crazy. Even the janitor must've been getting 200k a yr
The game industry has been doing a lot of fucking around for the last several years. Now the finding out stage has begun. We'll see if they learn anything.
Only the ones who survive have a chance to learn.
SONY: We never noticed a single problem until the moment the game was released.
Because you weren't looking, were you?
This is what happens when you try to pander to people who never buy video games in the first place.
It's really sad because these activist/woke terds are just losing more opportunities for jobs for those who are more qualified....hopefully other studios learn...hopefully
More than half probably bots
Those losers 😡 ruining our games.
Modern audience, modern outcome
stealing this one
Sounds about right 👍
Is that the updated: "Get Woke, Go Broke"?
Yes
Woke keeps failing hard af but they just keep doing it like they’re the stupid ones who don’t like to make money. People need to start asking why this is literally everywhere.
It's insanity. They literally keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for different results.
It’s become a religion. That’s why.
I think they hope they can simultaneously destroy independent media while forcing people to like their subpar products. However, nothing is working since gamers just play something else or worse, we just take our old games from the dust bin.
and people should start asking questions why their pension fund money is financing this vía DEI money
"do you know the definition of insanity?" - Vaas
So much for Concord possibly going free to play.
Yeah they gave up probably cuz they ralized that firwalks dumbass devs who called us assholes for reviewing the game honestly wouldnt break and fix it so they got shut down
Better as a tax write off.
I mean they still can, just without Firewalk
@@KirkFickert 100%. They had a open weekend before launch and only got like 3k people on Stream, honest smooth brain activity is they did make it FTP
@@TheDougiomaybe, but the main argument that it was going FTP was that people noticed it was still getting updates on Steam, ostensibly from the dev team.
Seems more and more tho that they always intended to have updates after launch that were staggered
What absolute legends, costing Soyny over $400mil. We really should be hailing them as heroes.
They better not remove any games like Ubisoft
It truly is ConcOVER
The chapter is closed but the book still has more pages.
Sony still has crunchyroll.
Hire the best person for the job... That's equality. Make forcing applicants to give their race and gender on applications illegal.
True... On merit... And also have gamers that know games involved in said hiring, because there was too many that NOT GAMERS.
[At next job interview]
"No, Sir, I was in prison for the last 8 years. I did NOT work on Concord."
I reckon when Elon walked into Twitter and fired 80% of the “workforce” might have demonstrated to the tech world that they could do the same
Yeah... the ensuing silence from other tech corps was amazing. They all watched Twitter to see if he could pull it off... and he did! Turns out you don't need 10 mouse clicking employees per engineer. Who woulda thunk it?
@@angrydachshund If you've ever taken a peek at the woke tech companies, a HUGE percentage of the employees do little to nothing of value.
You realize Twitter lost over 80% of its value within two years right? And the app currently works worse than before in every way. Elon Musk is not the genius you think he is, he's a scam artist.
@@Alondro77love the name, I had a bunch of dachshunds.
@@angrydachshund as a retired engineer, I couldn’t agree more.
I'd really like to know what the hell was going through Sony executives thick skulls when they poured money into this trashfire. 400 million down the toilet.
IDK if U ever heard of this but apparently we were suppose to get a cross over game between inFamous and Prototype but it was cancelled for Concord 💀
But hey man at least we got to see both Cole and Alex interact on Death Battle 🤷
@@Reverse-GokuSony taking notes from Warner I see
@@Reverse-Gokuthat would have been a fire idea and game... but knowing Sony, they'd fk it up
@@Koda.R I honestly am convinced that companies these days don’t give a damn on much money they’re losing and that they wouldn’t give less of a shit if they went bankrupt or not.
At one point at least the character designs were good. Decent at least. Hot women cool men. Then they got turned to universally repulsive sludge.
“Talentless freaks” - 1
Arrogant devs - 0
Luigi wins - Fatality! (by doing absolutely nothing)
My dance shoes are getting worn with all grave dancing I've been doing lately. 🕺 🥳
Keep them on for Bioware and Rocksteady.
After blowing through 400 million, over how many years? Yeah the studio deserves to be shut down, and whoever worked on it blacklisted lol.
Their first clue should have been when they had to double the budget to get it okay. People should've have been fired long ago
What I find so hilarious is that Xbox and Sony spent tens of billions of dollars buying all these studios only to be closing them down and laying off staff. Hopefully they realise sooner rather than later that the customer wields the power !!
They would rather burn everything down rather than admit to their stupidity.
And that the talent that populate those studios ARE the studio. Replace the talent and you lose everything. But for those big corporations an employee is an employee and they are all the same! 🤯
Imagine making a game so fucking bad it kills its developers
@@macky5636 they aren’t the only ones especially on a Sony machine just ask Factor 5
Hmmm. Some one should take that idea and run with it, sounds like a great Twilight zone or Black Mirror type story. Interesting.
Oh game history is full of stories like that. I still want Little Samson to get re-released, dammit!
It’s so bad that they don’t even want to try to monetize it as a free to play game. They wanted a ‘Star Wars’ and made ‘Disney Star Wars’.
Somehow, Concord did not return.
This is what happens when senior executives are at the golf course and strip club.
There's no saving it, the name Concord alone is basically synonymous with failure
And grape :)
Costa Concordia the Titanic clone and the AF Concorde passenger jet, and now a game called Concord with its Studio.....I'm seeing a pattern and I'm scared for the Mario Bros....
And yet gaming companies still aren't going to learn from this!
"All those games failed because of toxic gamers!" (✿◕‿◕✿)
They are, we just won't see the effects for like half a decade at least (modern AAAA game development takes a looooooong time)
Don't give money to people who hate you. Keep your wallet closed until these companies are gone and never give money to the leaders where they go.
And that’s 8 years and 400M dollars ddown the drain.
Remember when they called people, i quote, « talentless freaks »?
The irony speaks for itself.
“We are the stillborn. Nobody will mourn. Dozens of seats cold. DEI got old.”
3 black female characters, 0 white male characters. Which was also their player base.
There is one but he doesn't stand out as being as bad as the other characters which makes him less bad.
@@eddyghost840 he looks like an NPC from Starfield what do you mean? lol
"Modern audience will save us" only that they never do... They never show up.
they did! all less than 700 of them! xD
"Modern audience" = critics and investors, not actual customers.
Wake Them, Wake Them,
Gotta-Wake-Em-All.
Gotta. Wake. Them. All.
Wok e' Mon!!!
So much for bringing it back as F2P *Womp Womp*
I don’t think you understand a tax write off. Shutting this down isn’t a tax write off like movies. Movies are tax write off because they just take the hit without spending more on advertising. This game is already out, the only future expenses would be servers and dlc content which aren’t significant compared to marketing an unreleased movie. They shut down this down because it failed so hard
I don't think you understand corporate taxes. Like.. at all.
No Kneon, this doesn't need to stop, this needs to continue, we are witnessing the invisible hand of the market, let these studios fail and crash and a new age of indie games begin.
They got a paycheck for 8 years of producing slop
Instead of complaining, they should build their own companies the way they want. Talk is cheap
Wow. Sony forced them to firewalk off a cliff.
We also have unqualified ceo's and managers... I dare say most business owners are unqualified. Profits are only good if they don't make you compromise ethics. Wokeism came about from the last generation being power-hungry and cruel to everyone. If it's all about profits, then hiring bounty hunters would be fine, but it's not. Ethics must lead us, not profits.
They may try to burn down or lose any trace of this game development, but the memory will remain of ...how bad they botched both the game and launch.😑
Translation: "This was a dumpster fire of epic proportions that we'd like to forget as quickly as possible. To that end, we thank you for your efforts, here are your pink slips, and GTFO of your cubicles. Don't let the door hit you in the azz on the way out."
A message to the gaming industry:
We're not locked in here with you! You're locked in here with us!
Is it ultimately as simple as a Sony boss wanted their own version of a hero shooter, regardless of industry trends and the state of the genre, and didn't think past that goal?
Don't forget U.K. based, SEGA-owned prominent game studio Creative Assembly tried to pull that too, with "Hyenas". Which nobody wanted, and which SEGA forced them to cancel and reassign the money and devs that were being wasted on it to actually PROFITABLE projects, like their flagship of flagship titles, Warhammer (Fantasy) III, in their flagship game series, Total War.
Good on SEGA. They like to protect their investments in studios they own, and they monetize the HECK out of their most prominent in-house IP, Sonic, not just consistently releasing games, (like Sonic X Shadow Generations), but ALSO making deals to have EXCELLENT live action movies of Sonic made (the third of which comes out soon), AND making deals with LEGO (since 2016) to create licensed sets representing the Sonic IP.
SEGA evidently LIKES making money!
Apparently Sony doesn't. Because if they did, they would NEVER have commissioned Concord, or at LEAST canceled it somewhere along in its 8 FREAKING YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT before its DISASTROUS release!
That's what happened when Vtubing blew up. They bought a handful of smaller Vtuber agencies as the pandemic started winding down and viewership was plummeting, and then dissolved said agencies like a year later.
It really sucked because unlike lots of failed Vtuber agencies, Sony had big bucks that let the talents do things like do song covers of American songs (even Hololive is mostly limited to JP songs), and then they just did nothing to support the girls and then peaced out.
15:55 literally listening in background, just alt-tabbed from nfs mw (2005) to say it. 2005 graphics are lowkey good enough. And you can easly slap on some graphic enhancing mods too. And also the game is much more polished.
Eight days. Eight years of development for eight days of live service.
Sony wasted so much money. Buys the studio and then goes on to destroy the whole studio.
They did the same when they tried to get into Vtuber agencies. They bought a handful of agencies, then like a year later they shut them down.
Poor PRISM Project. They should've succeeded (Sony gave them song cover perms even established agencies like Hololive would kill for), but Sony just dropped them.
I feel bad for the 9 players that played this
Real Gamers: WE TOLD YOU SO!
Expect them to try to sweep Concord under the rug and burning it and the entire house to ashes. Nothing about that game is salvageable, let alone anything to be proud of. All the people who worked on it best have used aliases if they wish to get a new job, but I doubt they had that foresight.
Merit should have been the matter. Fans and customers are the ones that should be catered to. Pokémon would have been next since they have DEI hires instead of merit hires. Guitar Hero is a "too big to fail series" that failed, meaning that Pokémon may fail too.
Guitar hero was a gimmick franchise with accessories that everyone got tired of rebuying.
Pokemon is just backed by the richest toy makers in the world and an audience with so much tism they can't tell a good game from a bad one. Pokemon has plenty of money left in it.
@@wdf70Ed Sheeran's music label will demand millions of dollars to reuse 'Celestial' whenever there will be more Pokémon Scarlet and Violet copies to sell. That does happen like with Rage Against-I mean, Raging For the Machine to be able to feature 'Guerrilla Radio' in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2. Pokémon would lose money from different ways.
@@LuigiTheMetal64 I'd take a look into their marketing strategies and where their market share comes from. Nintendo makes pennies off their pokemon titles with majority of their money coming from merchandise sales. Look it up. Plushies sell 10x more than pokemon games.
Amazon will be puppeting the game's dead corpse in a show sometime soon.
jeff bozo showing off to the world how ok he is with flushing millions of dollars down the toilet
Sony sunk 400M, plus the cost of the buyout of Firewalk Studios for the "Future of Gaming". F*cking hilarious.
They walked into the fire.
Usually when I do that she gives me chlamydia
They wont even be a footnote in history. gta6 will probably be woke, and that failure will be what is considered the end of the culture.
Concord is arguably the biggest commercial failure in video game history. It won't be forgotten that easily.
On the contrary. The biggest video game failure of all time to date is more than a footnote
@@dogg-paws It depends on your age. I'm old enough to remember games like E.T. & worse.
@@swahler34ET was bad, but it didn't cost 400 million dollars.
@@GodOfPlague No it didn't. And 8 years of development? How can you release a generic game in a genre 8 years late to the party & expect sales?
Was the SBI worth it now devs?
I am surprised that Sony took that long to make the decision to close Firewalk Studios. There should be Harvard Business Case Study created on how not to run a game studio.
Pretty sure Sony lost way more than $400 million since this is only for the game budget. If we count the cost of marketing and how ever much Sony spent buying the studio, the actual cost is at least $500 ~ $600 million if we are being generous.
Also all of the future unrelated projects they probably have to cancel. Lotsa modern corpos plan out product road maps assuming they will receive X amount of money. If they don't hit those goals, well...
Sony, what happened to you? Where is your QC team? Seriously you would imagine that having money would afford better research and development. If this was going to happen, why not just be rip-off mercs? Less wastage! And you would have had at least 200 titles! Of better quality!
No Concord 2: the Concording? 😆
AAA games - crap
Indies games - fun
Valheim - fun
Endouded - fun
Palworld - fun
Baldurs Gate 3 - fun
Never played BG3 because of the gay bear humping.
I loved the first two though, and people seem to like the third so I might have to check it out on sale.
@@jonrussell7567 You can skip the romance if you want to, games pretty much the best crpg version of dnd 5e that exists now
@@matthewoconnor2742 Not a giant fan of 5e, but fair. 4e was the last I played, but mostly 3.0-3.5.
@matthewoconnor2742 And I don't mind if the game includes gay bear humping, it's just usually a sign of woke ideology creeping in. Ie, strang whamans, midevial Europe looking like downtown LA 2024, all women being beaten with the ugly stick within an inch of their life and that sort of thing.
Well... When you make a game that targets less than 1% of the global population and expects better results... That's just not good business.
The best demotivational poster I've ever seen was just a picture of fries with the caption "Not everyone gets to be an astronaut."
I guess Firewalk's new pronouns are Out/Of/Business.
It was such a massive waste of money and time, it would be hard to imagine the shareholders aren't screaming their faces off. The fact this thing was green-lit and released and NOBODY in upper management realised how bad it was, the fact that they were even enthusiastic about it... They have no idea what they're doing. These executives in entertainment must be getting gas-lit like crazy with people around them telling them how great these projects are.
The fact they have another project exactly like this around the corner and people are already expecting it to flop, the industry is in such a terrible state. They're so far detached from what their customers want and polarised against it, it's become such a joke. At some point an adult has to enter the room and point out how much money and time is being wasted. There's just so much value that's been lost to this dumb fad. So many years, so much money, so much productivity just lost for nothing. Their only job is to make something entertaining and they refuse to do it. The only thing they can make that's fun is a kid's game about a robot, because there's no way anyone can screw with it to turn it into something obnoxious.
Old game prices have trippled since modern games started going down hill.
they cant write it off on taxes they already released it, people played it, still have copies, and are making money off of them. not possible
What we have here is an exceedingly rare victory for common sense
The second players hopped on and realized they couldn’t replay characters they would’ve left. What character shooter actively prevents players from maining a character??
10:57 This is what happens when the participation trophy culture is allowed to exist and expand instead of being forcibly repressed.
Concord crashed and burned because Sony no longer understands the gaming market. They released a slow-ass, woke-as-hell, hero shooter for $40 in 2024. What could go wrong?
I’ve said this many times about keeping older games going! Batman Arkham Knight was such a good game engine and graphically detailed where you could’ve kept making episode dlc/ story add ons and kept that game going with all the stories of different Batman comics
Oh man, the "what could an indie studio do with $400 million?" got me. Imagine the games we could have had if they parced that out $10 million to 40 indie studios, we could have had 40 OUTSTANDING games... Sad days.
8 years and 400 million usd! How many indie or AA projects could they have supported during that time? These teams, timelines, and costs are bloated beyond reason. The tech and entertainment industries need to slim down.
Looks like you could say they are... fire walking out of the studio.
Sony should let those employees go completely anyone who worked on Concord should be completely blacklisted from working in the game industry.
I swear since Gamer Gate in 2014, Anita Sarkeesian and activist like her have been the worst thing thats happened to gaming and geek/nerd culture.
Sad that they lost their jobs! NOT! Go join the unemployment line!
400mil eh. They could’ve given a chimp a bag of bananas and a keyboard and it would’ve churned out a better game than Concord.
Hahahahahahahahahaha... oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
There is only one reason why these activist came to the game industry in the first place, ResetEra. Long before DEI was a thing, ResetEra had all of these damn activists converging on their site. This included employees from Atlus, Bandai, Ubisoft Bioware, etc. While, yes Black Rock, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs can and should be blamed for this DEI crap, never forget it originated on Neogaff and ResetEra back in 2007.
It was obvious to me that this was going to happen.
Sony probably thought about bringing Concord back in some way, shape or form, but the amount of work that would take and the amount of resources they would spend was greater than make two AstroBot like games (in quality).
Talking to a friend who got jammed back up in a managerial role. He has Gen Z workers. They don't know how to use Microsoft Office applications. Also, they apparently play retro arcade games for fun.
AAA gaming is cooked.
This was not a surprise. There was no way it was going to relaunch. It had so much bad PR that even if you make it free, it can not compete in the market. It is way easier to just burn it down, and reuse the code and make a completely new game.
Timings a bit weird too. Announce around DA released? Almost like they were waiting for the reaction to either sweep it under or as a reaction.
💯 agree with you Kneon. How long can any company deal with losses before it affects the bottom line. Either you perform well or you’re fired. Simple and direct. Working in manufacturing they have to keep things moving 24/7 for better or worse that’s the nature of the beast. Keep up the good work.
Also, prayers for Geeky and that both of you get better. Having Crud is no fun. ❤
Finally, some good concording news.
they are not going not go back to basics. only companies that have no debt can do that. debt collectors are the ones forcing this on them.
"You can't hear an image, it's not how it works"
The image: 6:40
It doesn't matter how much people work hard on something. The people who have the highest potential to buy the product decide if it sells or not. Activists don't buy stuff. Gamers want games they can enjoy.
Covid shut another studio = games journalists.
Put that in your pronouns. hahaha
Just a reminder, they actually lost players when the game went free in beta. Don't think F2P would even save it.
I wonder if Sony will ever realise that the “modern audience” is less than a millionth of what they think that it is?
Apparently Sony didn’t learn from Ghostbusters 2014 .
Oh no... anyways.
Still hoping that they release one last update to the game where it deletes Achievements/Trophies and removes the game from their hard drives.
$400 million + 8 years is 2 Elden Rings' worth. holy cow.
I remember people on twitter saying Sony was going to bring Concord back and make it a F2P Games-as-Service model... wah happon??
The basics of the law you are referring to is more or less "Even if a product is released. If you recall and destroy all physical versions to the point it is as if it never came out, then you can write it off as a product that was never reached market."